---
name: "Kon Ichikawa"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/kon-ichikawa"
fi1m_id: "kon-ichikawa"
imdb_id: "nm0406728"
tmdb_id: 97205
wikidata_id: "Q55397"
roles: ["Director"]
born: "20 November 1915"
died: "13 February 2008"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 2
average_fi1m_score: 86
average_as: "director"
average_over: 2
updated: "2026-09-26T15:42:23.284283+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Kon Ichikawa

## Identity

Kon Ichikawa

- **Canonical:** https://film.one/person/kon-ichikawa
- **Type:** Person
- **Fi1m ID:** kon-ichikawa
- **IMDb ID:** nm0406728
- **TMDB ID:** 97205
- **Wikidata ID:** Q55397
- **Same entity:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon_Ichikawa, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q55397, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0406728/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/97205

Director. Born 20 November 1915 in Mie, Japan. Died 13 February 2008.

## Details

- **Work:** Director
- **Born:** 20 November 1915, Mie, Japan
- **Died:** 13 February 2008
- **Active:** 1956–1965
- **Also known as:** 이치카와 곤, Кон Итикава, 久里子亭, 市川儀一, 大川新之助, 市川秋六, 市川根作, 곤 이치카와, 이치가와 곤, 곤 이치가와, 콘 이치카와, 이치카와 콘
- **Frequently works with:** [Natto Wada](https://film.one/person/natto-wada.md)
- **Berlin International Film Festival:** 1 Berlin prize (1 won)
- **Average Fi1m score:** 86, as director, over 2 titles
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon_Ichikawa, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q55397, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0406728/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/97205

## Streaming the US now

- **HBO Max:** [*Tokyo Olympiad*](https://film.one/film/tokyo-olympiad.md) (88)

For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country.

## Fi1m on Kon Ichikawa

> Kon Ichikawa began as an animator and composed films as an illustrator fills a page: one figure off to the side, dark all around it. The fifteen years with Natto Wada writing are the reason to know his name, and we rate them highly.

Look at almost any frame of *An Actor's Revenge* (1963) and you can see the joins. The street is painted, the moon is a lamp, and a thief sits above the story telling us what to make of it. Most directors who borrow from the theatre hide the wires; Ichikawa lights them. He started in the animation department of J.O. Studio in Kyoto in 1933, and his first film as director, *A Girl at Dojo Temple* (1946), used puppets. "I'm still a cartoonist," he told Donald Richie, and that is how he composes: a figure placed off to one side of a wide frame, with a great deal of dark or colour left around it.

The films that matter were made between 1950 and 1965, with his wife Natto Wada writing; they made twenty-eight together. *The Burmese Harp* (1956) is a soldier who puts on a monk's robes to bury the dead. *Conflagration* (1958) is Mishima, obsession and destruction. *Fires on the Plain* (1959) takes Japanese soldiers in the Philippines a long way past hunger. Then the kabuki melodrama, and then *Tokyo Olympiad* (1965), a record of the 1964 Games that looks at effort and loss rather than heroes. Wada stopped writing. He went on working into the 2000s, with thrillers such as *The Inugami Family* (1976), adaptations such as *The Makioka Sisters* (1983) and a 1985 remake of *The Burmese Harp*, and died in Tokyo in 2008.

The usual complaint is that a man who made war films, a Mishima adaptation, a kabuki melodrama and a sports documentary in one decade cannot have a style, and was a craftsman rather than an author. We think this gets him backwards. The style is the subject: one person set apart from everyone else, and a camera that watches how long they last, whether the soldier, the actor in a woman's robe or the athlete who has lost. What he did not much care for was plot. The middle of *An Actor's Revenge*, all rice prices and rumour, goes slack because he is more interested in where the light falls than in who is being ruined, and we lost the thread and did not mind. What we did mind, more than we expected, were the scenes in which Kazuo Hasegawa's Yukinojo courts Ayako Wakao's Namiji in a woman's voice, meaning every gentle word as a lie; Ichikawa neither softens it nor points at it, and Wakao's face does the rest. The widescreen frame he liked was lit for him, film after film, by Setsuo Kobayashi and Kazuo Miyagawa, and cut by Chizuko Osada.

Start with *An Actor's Revenge*, in a dark room, since half the picture is black and a lamp behind you will fill it. Go on to the war films if you can bear them. The later decades are handsome and mostly routine, the same eye with less to look at, and you can leave them until you have run out of the others.

## Biography

Kon Ichikawa (1915–2008) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. He began his career in animation in the 1930s before moving into live-action directing in the 1940s.

He is known for a wide range of films, including the anti-war drama *The Burmese Harp* (1956), the period revenge story *An Actor's Revenge* (1963), and the documentary *Tokyo Olympiad* (1965), on which he also received a writing credit. The latter won two BAFTA Film Awards. Ichikawa often collaborated with his wife, screenwriter Natto Wada, on screenplays during the 1950s and 1960s.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org.*

## On Fi1m (2)

- *Tokyo Olympiad* (1965), Fi1m 88, Thanks, Director, Writer — [page](https://film.one/film/tokyo-olympiad.md)
- *An Actor's Revenge* (1963), Fi1m 85, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/an-actors-revenge.md)

## Complete filmography (106)

Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page.

- *The Magic Hour* (2008), as Film Director
- *Ten Nights of Dreams* (2007), Director
- *Enlightenment: A Second Night of Dreams* (2007), Director
- *Murder of the Inugami Clan* (2006), Writer, Director
- *Musume no kekkon* (2003), Director
- *Ten Dark Women* (2002), Director
- *The Life of Bangaku* (2002), series, Director
- *Kah-chan* (2001), Director
- *Dora-heita* (2000), Director, Screenplay
- *Shinsengumi* (2000), Director, Writer
- *Kon Ichikawa: My Life in Cinema* (1999), as Interviewee
- *The 8-Tomb Village* (1996), Screenplay, Director
- *Un bel dì vedremo* (1996), Story
- *Fusa* (1995), Director, Writer
- *47 Ronin* (1994), Director, Screenplay
- *Kogarashi Monjirō Returns* (1993), Director, Screenplay
- *Noh Mask Murders* (1991), Screenplay, Director
- *Battleship Yamato* (1990), Director, Screenplay
- *Crane* (1988), Director, Writer
- *Princess from the Moon* (1987), Director, Writer
- *Actress* (1987), Director, Producer, Screenplay
- *The Hall of the Crying Deer* (1986), Writer, Director
- *The Adventures of Milo and Otis* (1986), Co-Director
- *The Burmese Harp* (1985), Director
- *Ohan* (1984), Executive Producer, Director, Writer
- *The Makioka Sisters* (1983), Director, Writer, Executive Producer
- *Lonely Heart* (1981), Screenplay, Director
- *Koto: The Ancient City* (1980), Writer, Director
- *Galaxy Express 999: The Movie* (1979), Screenplay
- *The House of Hanging* (1979), Director, Screenplay
- *The Phoenix* (1978), Director
- *Queen Bee* (1978), Director, Writer
- *Island of Hell* (1977), Executive Producer, Director
- *Lullaby to Kill* (1977), Screenplay, Director, Executive Producer
- *The Inugami Family* (1976), Director, Screenplay
- *Between Women and Wives* (1976), Director
- *I Am a Cat* (1975), Director
- *Visions of Eight* (1973), Narrator, Director
- *The Wanderers* (1973), Director, Producer's Assistant, Screenplay
- *Kogarashi Monjiro* (1972), series, Director, Writer, Creator
- *To Love Again* (1971), Director
- *Dodes'ka-den* (1970), Executive Producer
- *Japan and the Japanese* (1970), Director
- *Kyoto* (1969), Director
- *Youth: The 50th National High School Baseball Tournament* (1968), Director
- *Topo Gigio and the Missile War* (1967), Writer, Director
- *The Tale of Genji* (1966), Director
- *Tokyo Olympics (International Version)* (1965), Director
- *Tokyo Olympiad* (1965), Director, Writer, Thanks — Fi1m 88, [page](https://film.one/film/tokyo-olympiad.md)
- *The Money Dance* (1964), Director, Screenplay
- *Alone Across the Pacific* (1963), Director
- *An Actor's Revenge* (1963), Director — Fi1m 85, [page](https://film.one/film/an-actors-revenge.md)
- *Being Two Isn't Easy* (1962), Director, Producer
- *The Broken Commandment* (1962), Director
- *Ten Women in Black* (1961), Director
- *Her Brother* (1960), Director
- *The Woman Who Touched Legs* (1960), Writer, Executive Producer
- *Bonchi* (1960), Screenplay, Director
- *A Woman's Testament* (1960), Director
- *Fires on the Plain* (1959), Director
- *Odd Obsession* (1959), Director, Editor, Screenplay
- *Goodbye, Hello* (1959), Screenplay, Director, Story
- *Conflagration* (1958), Director, Screenplay
- *Hole in One* (1957), Writer, Director
- *The Men of Toho-ku* (1957), Director, Screenplay
- *The Crowded Train* (1957), Director, Screenplay
- *Bridge of Japan* (1956), Director
- *Punishment Room* (1956), Director
- *The Burmese Harp* (1956), Director
- *The Heart* (1955), Director
- *Ghost Story of Youth* (1955), Director
- *12 Chapters About Women* (1954), Director
- *A Billionaire* (1954), Director, Writer
- *All of Myself* (1954), Director, Writer
- *The Lovers* (1953), Writer, Director
- *Brilliant! The First Detective: Zenigata Heiji in His Youth* (1953), Director, Screenplay
- *The Blue Revolution* (1953), Director
- *Mr. Pu* (1953), Director, Writer
- *This Way, That Way* (1952), Director, Screenplay
- *The Woman Who Touched the Legs* (1952), Screenplay, Director
- *Forbidden Path* (1952), Screenplay, Director
- *Mr. Lucky* (1952), Director
- *Wedding March* (1951), Director, Writer
- *Bengawan Solo* (1951), Writer, Director
- *Stolen Love* (1951), Director, Writer
- *The Man Without a Nationality* (1951), Director
- *Koibito* (1951), Writer, Director
- *Nightshade Flower* (1951), Screenplay, Director
- *Pursuit At Dawn* (1950), Story, Director
- *Heat and Mud* (1950), Director, Screenplay
- *Sanshiro of Ginza* (1950), Director
- *Endless Passion* (1949), Director
- *Ningen moyo* (1949), Director
- *365 Nights: Osaka* (1948), Director
- *365 Nights: Tokyo* (1948), Director
- *365 Nights* (1948), Director
- *A Flower Blooms* (1948), Director
- *A Thousand and One Nights with Toho* (1947), Director, Writer
- *A Girl At Dojo Temple* (1946), Director
- *World of Love* (1943), Assistant Director
- *Hyoroku's Dream Tale* (1943), Production Manager
- *Enoken's Bow-Wow General* (1940), Assistant Director
- *Old Songs* (1939), Assistant Director
- *Fallen Blossoms* (1938), Assistant Director
- *Shinsetsu Kachikachi Yama* (1936), Writer, Director
- *Cowardly samurai squad* (1935), Animation

## Gallery

- ![市川崑（1955年）](https://film.one/media/person/3874279/gallery-d30d9ebc7242.jpg) 市川崑（1955年） — 産業経済新聞社（Sankei Shinbun Co., Ltd.）, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/Ichikawa-Kon-2.jpg/1280px-Ichikawa-Kon-2.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Kon Ichikawa](https://film.one/media/person/3874279/gallery-d791dfcc4be8.jpg) Kon Ichikawa — Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Kon_Ichikawa.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)

## Awards

### Berlin International Film Festival — 1 won

- 2000: Berlinale Camera (won)

### Other awards — 6 won

- Person of Cultural Merit 1994: Person of Cultural Merit (won)
- Medal with Purple Ribbon 1982: Medal with Purple Ribbon (won)
- Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Director 1963: Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Director (won), for *The Outcast*
- Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Director 1961: Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Director (won), for *Her Brother*
- Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Director 1960: Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Director (won), for *Fires on the Plain*
- Jury Prize 1960: Jury Prize (won), for *Odd Obsession*

*From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.*

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/kon-ichikawa